TallGuyCalif's Computer Gaming and Entertainment Site

Category: Videos

  • LOTRO Middle Earth Tour Part 1: Ered Luin

    This is the start of my tour of Middle Earth as envisioned by The Lord of the Rings Online (LOTRO). LOTRO is such a huge game that I thought it would be worthwhile to show people how amazing it is. I decided I would ride from end to end and post the video, but I will do it in segments, because it may become boring and I don’t have access to all areas yet (at least not without being killed quickly).

    I’m also experimenting with capture approaches. My GTX280 video card failed, and in the process of diagnosing that, I built myself a new Sandy Bridge Core-i7 rig with 8GB of RAM and a GTX570, all in a nice red mini-ATX case. Unfortunately, the new GTX570 doesn’t have component video out, so I can’t use the Hauppauge HDPVR to capture anymore, at least not directly. The video below was captured using the HDPVR, but after the HDMI signal fr0m the computer was converted to component by a Blackmagic Intensity Shuttle. Why not use the Shuttle to capture directly? Well, the software is a little unforgiving (ok, horrible) and when I did this video, I didn’t have it figured out. I did use the Shuttle to capture the second part of the tour, but have so far been unable to get it to finish uploading to YouTube (it’s failing for the 3rd time as I write this).

    Unfortunately, just as I was experimenting with video capture, I was experimenting with audio capture. While the audio capture approach I used here worked in tests, it failed in real life, so this video doesn’t have sound. This is a shame, because LOTRO music is great. The soundtrack is varied and generally excellent – one of the best game soundtracks out there.

    This video shows me leaving Thorin’s Hall on my goat (you need a goat to ride in Moria, but you can ride it elsewhere and it is as fast as a normal horse) and riding past Gondamon, through Duillond, then into the Shire gate. Sadly, it’s at night, so the colors are muted, but LOTRO has a great night sky, which I show off a bit during the ride.

  • Halo Reach Space Fighting is Fun!

    The space fighting part of Halo Reach is the most fun, so far, but it was quite short, and since my Sabre was destroyed with the Covenant super-carrier, not likely to be repeated soon. The first video here shows part of the first space battle. It gets busier in the attack wave after the video, but is more of the same. As you can see, my teammates can’t seem to hit much of anything, so I have to do most of the blowing things up…

    In the second movie, we’re going after a Covenant corvette to take it over and use it in the upcoming attempt to destroy the super-carrier. I get the task of taking out the engines.

    Once we disabled the corvette, there are some fun battles inside to gain control. Then things go from bad to worse, but that’s for another post.

  • Halo Reach Turret Shooting

    Because Halo Reach put me more than an hour back in my game, I had a chance to relive some of my favorite moments so far. The first is as I’m being airlifted to a spire I need to shut down. I got to shoot from the turret and took out a lot of Covenant baddies and AA guns on the ground. Pretty fun.

    The next video shows the launch of my Sabre into orbit. It’s a cutscene, but it looks pretty good. Both videos are available in 1080p if your machine has the guts and your display has the pixels.

    I’ll have a couple more videos tomorrow. They’re uploading now, but I’m not going to wait for them to be done processing.

  • A Closer Look at KOTOR

    I played a bit more of Knights of the Old Republic and remembered the good and bad parts of it. The good (great) parts are the story and much of the combat. The combat is a combined real-time and turn-based mix that works pretty well. As you can see in the video below, I can pause the battle to look around, issue commands to each of my characters, then continue. Each character has a set of attack options, including power attacks, force powers (for the Jedi in the party) and grenades. In addition, healing and shield activation are also selectable. Each action takes a turn, so some things happen maddeningly slowly. In addition, once an action is started, you can’t stop it, so healing, for example, will have to wait until the next turn.

    You can see in the video that I did a naughty thing by leveling up during combat, which replenished my hitpoints. Most games don’t allow that sort of thing just to prevent an unfair advantage, like I took here.

    The bad thing about KOTOR is that the view is fairly fixed. You can rotate around your characters, but can’t zoom in or out, nor can you change elevation to get a better view. This feels a bit constraining. The graphics are okay, particularly given the age of the game. It runs in 1600×1200 just fine, but doesn’t support widescreen modes (without unofficial patches).

    In all, Bioware did an amazing job of transforming D&D rules into the Star Wars universe with light sabers and vibroswords (really) replacing bastard swords, force powers replacing magic, and blasters taking the place of bows and arrows. The game works well, as does its sequel. Perhaps the new Star Wars MMO will turn out to bring some of the greatness of these games back.

  • Game Console Video Capture post by ggamdori

    Take a look a gamer ggamdori’s post on various capture devices that can be used to capture gaming videos from PS3 and Xbox 360. His post compares 4 devices from 2 companies and shows the strengths of each. http://www.ggamdori.com/?p=189

  • X3:Terran Conflict

    The X series of games from Egosoft are some of the best space combat/building/trading games you can play. They are exciting, fun, have a plot that you can follow or ignore, and are very open ended. I started with X2:The Threat, then played X3:Reunion, and am still playing X3:Terran Conflict. In all these games, you start out with a wimpy ship and knowledge of one sector in space, as well as a mission to help somebody or another. Over time, you acquire more powerful ships, explore many star systems, and save the universe in various ways. How you get those better ships and what kind they are is up to you. You can fight and destroy enemies to the various races, thus getting bounties and fulfilling missions; you can trade cargo, eventually building up a trade empire with trader ships working for you; you can capture enemy ships and use them or sell them; or you can build factories and complexes of factories to make and sell goods to others. Or you can do all of the above, which is what I enjoy. One of the great things about the X series is that you can have many ships, including fighters, fast scouts, battleships, carriers, corvettes, and more, and you can fly each of them, depending on your style or your need at the moment. The enemy, too, has a variety of ships, so you will need to match their firepower.

    The fighting in the X series is usually done in a fighter or Corvette, with you aiming and pulling the trigger. The weapons vary from projectile launchers to plasma throwers to other types of energy weapons, each of which has a range and a travel speed to the target. You can use assisted aiming (once you have bought it) to help you hit fast moving and maneuvering ships. You choose which weapons to activate at any time, so you can choose lots of damage to destroy a ship or mostly shield damage to convince the other pilot to bail out (so you can take the ship as salvage!). The fighting is the most fun part of the game, in my opinion, but there are others that really like the empire building or trading aspects more.

    The X series has the most amazing forums with great people there willing to help with troubles in a mission or give suggestions for places to trade. It is by far the best user community I’ve seen. Egosoft is also pretty amazing – they continue to update their games a year or more after it is out. Their games are available on Steam and the most amazing thing is that I could enter my X3:TC serial number from the disk version into Steam and now I have the Steam version and all the achievements available! I don’t know of anyone else who has done that for their customers.

    I have uploaded two videos to show how beautiful a game X3:TC is, but I have somewhat failed. As an experiment, I set the bitrate lower on my Hauppauge HD PVR, and the videos are quite muddy and indistinct. Darn. But you can still get an idea of the beauty of the game. These are 1080p videos, so please view them at full screen if you have a good computer.

    In the first video, I jump from Argon Prime to Kingdom End and fly around a bit. I fly near a station to give you an idea of the size, and I’m in a pretty good sized corvette class ship.

    In the second video, I give a tour of some of my fleet in Argon Prime. First I fly my little scout near a couple of corvettes, then to my transport, which is huge; then over to my destroyer, also quite large; and finally to my carrier, which currently holds 43 fighters and scouts. At the end, I order the carrier to launch a fighter and fly around with it to show how attractive it is.

    Overall, I really enjoy the X games, and X3:TC is the best of the bunch. Get it and have a great flight!

  • Star Trek Online Battle

    In this Star Trek Online battle, my ship, the USS Ampere, is protecting a damaged ship from waves of alien attacks. Since my ship is a science vessel, it doesn’t have very powerful weapons, but does have good shields, so my hull is well protected. You can see that the battle is generally turning and worrying about firing arcs. The enemies are not very tough in this battle, so they don’t do too much damage. Against the last battleship, I call in a “photonic fleet” of helpers that take the heat off me as we weaken the enemy’s shields and I pump quantum torpedoes into it. This is an HD video, so be sure to view it full screen and at 1080p resolution if your machine can handle it.

  • Big videos

    Well, right after I uploaded the Star Trek Online navigation video to YouTube, I started uploading a longer Star Trek Online space battle video. This one was about 1GB and 10 minutes. It took several hours to upload, for which we can blame the pathetic ISP monopolies in the USA, but even once it was uploaded, it has been “processing” for hours. I can’t imaging it takes that long to convert to all the YouTube resolutions. I suspect that because it is more than a couple minutes, YouTube staff need to review it for copyright violations, since a 10 minute video is probably more likely to be ripped from somewhere than a one minute video of a crazy cat. Too bad the assumption can’t be that I own the copyright and it can be reviewed later if there is any doubt. Or maybe it really does take that long to process. Anyway, I will post it to the site once the upload and processing finish.

  • Star Trek Online Sector Map Navigation

    This video shows sector map navigation in Star Trek Online. My ship, the USS Ampere, is in the galactic map sort of near DS9 and Bajor. I turn around an enter the Rolor Nebula, an area with randomly generated missions that you can repeat over and over again (and must if you want to rise in the Diplomatic Corps ranks). Once in the nebula, I head over to an anomaly, which in this case is something to scan. Then you see the scanning mini-game where I match the waveform of the scan and get bonus materials. Note: This is an HD video (1920×1080) if you go full-screen and choose 1080p in the video size options.

  • Gaming Video Capture

    There are lots of people, including me, that post gaming videos on YouTube. The trick is to figure out how to capture the video. On a PC, we can use utilities like FRAPS to capture frames and make a movie from it. This works, but burdens the system a bit while you are playing the game. Another option is a capture device to capture HDMI or component video (we’re talking HD here, none of that low-res SVideo or composite junk). An internal card, like the Blackmagic Intensity Pro, can capture either HDMI or component and has a pass-through so you can play the game with no delay (capture devices always add a delay because they are busy compressing your video), but the HDMI capture is not useful for PS3 (or Blu-Ray players) because of HDCP encryption.

    I chose an external USB device, the Hauppauge HD PVR 1212, which has component input and pass-through, as well as optical audio in and out, SVideo and composite inputs, and front and back analog audio inputs and pass-through). It captures straight to H.264 compressed video with 3 different wrappers, one that plays well on XBox 360, one for PS3, and one for general video editing. The software can apparently make DVDs that will play back HD in Blu-Ray players, though I haven’t tried that. The unit itself is a plastic rectangle a little bigger and taller than a Mac Mini and it has funky blue “bling” lights that glow when recording (can be turned off). The software is minimal, but seems quite functional, and that’s what matters. The great thing is that the hardware does the compression into H.264, so you can use a laptop or other weak PC to control the unit. I’m using an Atom&Ion-based “Nettop” computer to record the files from the HD PVR and it works great.

    I also discovered that my NVIDIA GTX 280 card in my PC has component video output, so the HD PVR can record 1080i from my PC. I am uploading videos as I write this showing the results. They aren’t great, because of the analog capture and interlacing, but they seem pretty good and it didn’t slow my PC like FRAPS would have. I do think the captures from the PS3 look better than from the PC, perhaps because of better cabling or perhaps because the lettering and such on the PS3 are made for TV viewing so are bigger and smoother, while PC text is small and sharp on a digital monitor, but not as great on analog component video.